Fairchild Chairman and Editor Patrick McCarthy Is Dead at 67

It’s been reported that millennials aren’t into one-company careers; editor Patrick McCarthy, who died this weekend at 67, thought differently. He spent his entire career at Fairchild Publications (now Fairchild Fashion Media). During the years McCarthy spent at Women’s Wear Daily and W Magazine, he was a front row fixture. Clad in a suit or his “collegiate” uniform of a blazer and pants, he remained inscrutable under his dramatic brows.

McCarthy was the mentee of the blustery John Fairchild, who is said to have treated him like a son and who imbued in his colleague the fighting spirit of the old-fashioned newsroom. That McCarthy tracked stories like a bloodhound was evidence that he had absorbed Fairchild’s lessons, though he adopted a different mien when stalking a lead and his quarry was broader, as befit an industry that was growing and becoming more accepting of high-low dichotomies.

Things were more black and white when McCarthy started with the company in the mid-1970s. After graduating from Stanford, he signed on to work with the Fairchild’s Financial News Service in Washington, D.C., and was named head of the FNS in London in 1978, an appointment that coincided with the exit of one of Women’s Wear Daily’s writers. Soon, McCarthy was on the Eye and fashion beats. In 1980, he succeeded André Leon Talley as WWD’s Paris bureau chief, a position he held for five years. “I instantly bonded with Karl [Lagerfeld],” McCarthy noted in an interview with New York magazine. “Pierre Bergé. Claude Montana to an extent. I started getting to know the people I was covering. It was easier than it is now. It was about long dinners and getting bombed and talking and weekends. There were no palazzos. It was a totally different industry.” Soon, designers would be as famous as rock stars; McCarthy’s star would continue to rise, as well. Returning to the United States in 1985, McCarthy became editor of WWD. In 1997, three years after reinventing W Magazine, he succeeded John Fairchild as chairman and editorial director of Fairchild Publications. He left the company in 2010.

Though McCarthy’s deadpan expression revealed little, his work speaks volumes about his capacity to toil, his determination, and also his wiliness. He liked to recount the story of his encounter with the then-reclusive Jazz Age beauty Lady Diana Cooper. He got the interview, but Fairchild was displeased with the photo. No amount of cajoling was convincing her ladyship to grant an audience to a photographer until she negotiated directly with McCarthy to be paid a modeling fee of £200. McCarthy won on two fronts that day: He got his picture, and he earned the respect of the big boss. “I spent five years [in Paris] begging, borrowing, and, only occasionally, stealing. And getting the story, whenever I could,” McCarthy wrote in an essay on Fairchild for Vogue, in which his renowned wit is on display. About that essay, he quipped: “I really wanted to make it good for Mr. Fairchild’s sake, but not too good, because I don’t want people to run around saying what a great magazine Vogue is!” That he himself was a great and dedicated editor is beyond doubt.